Next generation networking middleware

The convergence of telecommunication networks has opened up prospects for a rich ecosystem of IP-based next-generation network technologies and applications. The emergence of principles and practices such as Virtualization, the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) and Web 2.0, along with gradual adoption of industry standards such as the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), and Java API for Internetworking (JAIN) is making this convergence possible. The chal- lenges to the operators are to provide suitable interfaces to an increasingly complex and heterogeneous underlying wireless access landscape, typically consisting of cel- lular (e. g., UMTS, LTE, etc.), metropolitan area (e. g., WiMAX) and short-range (e. g., WiFi) systems. Future telecom service providers, on the other hand, are expected to stem from the fact that a converged network needs to carry a multitude of high- bandwidth triple-play (voice, video, and data) services over a single network, which is much more distributed, multipoint, diverse, and interactive in nature. Virtualization is an emerging trend that refers to an abstraction of computing re- sources in a way that makes physical computing resources (e. g., processors, storage, connectivity) totally transparent to other systems, applications, as well as end-users that interact with these resources. In a virtualized environment, multiple distributed resources are federated and appear as a single logical resource. State of the art virtu- alization deployments facilitate enterprises in aggregating, configuring, and manag- ing enterprise resources in a cost-effective fashion. Nevertheless, these deployments focus on relatively homogeneous environments (e. g., environments comprising sin- gle vendor resources) and selected types of computing resources. End-to-end (E2E) virtualization solutions aim at extending the benefits of virtualization in larger scale environments, spanning multiple heterogeneous resources across geographical and administrative boundaries. To cater to these emerging service paradigms, the network intelligence has to ad- dress several aspects including multimedia session management, coordination of multi-protocol connections, and advanced security. Multimedia content delivery over the Internet has been extensively researched. However, the related engineering problem is evolving into the problem of how to dynamically create content distribu- tion infrastructures and services in the context of telco-provider managed networks. This 6th International Workshop on Next Generation Networking Middleware (NGNM 2009) was held as part of the 5th International Week on Management of Networks and Services (Manweek 2009) in Venice, Italy.